A Ukrainian drone strike has caused damage at a second data center belonging to Russian tech giant Yandex, knocking out several modules at a facility in the Kaluga region, the company’s press service stated earlier today. On Oct. 8, a drone strike and a fire caused the data center in Sasovo, Ryazan Region, to halt operations. The company had previously called the Kaluga facility its most powerful data center in Russia, The Insider found.
Yandex said specialists are still assessing the scale of the damage in Kaluga. The attack has caused interruptions across some of the company’s digital services; however, the specific systems that were affected and whether the disabled modules can be restored have not been announced. Preliminary reports do not mention any human casualties.
Construction of the Kaluga data center began in 2022 on the territory of the Grabtsevo industrial park. Yandex’s original project was designed to house more than 3,800 server racks, with a total design capacity of 63 MW — one and a half times that of the company’s most powerful data center at the time of announcement. The site is intended both for Yandex’s own services and for customers of the Yandex Cloud platform.
According to official documents of the Kaluga city administration, the first phase of the facility was commissioned in December 2023. In October 2024, the System Operator of the Unified Energy System reported the connection of Yandex’s largest data center to the power grid with a maximum power consumption of 49 MW, though the company has not disclosed the amount of server equipment at the site at the time of the attack.
The day before, drones knocked out a data center in the Ryazan Region
Overnight into Oct. 8, Ukrainian drones attacked Yandex’s data center in the city of Sasovo in the Ryazan Region, located on the grounds of the Sasta machine-tool plant. The strike caused a fire at the facility, forcing the management to suspend operations. As of the evening of Oct. 8, the company could not confirm whether the damaged equipment could be restored.
The data center in Sasovo opened in 2014 and is designed to house tens of thousands of servers. It is currently home to two of Yandex’s three supercomputers, which the company uses to develop and train artificial intelligence models, including YandexGPT. The extent of damage to these assets remains unknown.
On Oct. 8, large-scale disruptions occurred in the operation of Russian internet services. As The Insider reported, users ran into problems opening the websites of Russian media outlets, Russian Railways, the real estate platform Cian, the classifieds portal Avito, and other platforms. Cian confirmed that the disruptions were linked to an incident at a facility of its infrastructure partner. Problems were also recorded in the operation of Yandex’s own services.
On the Yandex Cloud status page, the company reported that the ru-central1-b zone, associated with the data center in Sasovo, was completely unavailable. Customers were advised to move their workloads to other availability zones. At the same time, the outage imposed restrictions on creating new virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, and databases.
On Oct. 8, the independent outlet Verstka also found that Yandex had concealed satellite images of its four cloud data centers, including the facilities in Sasovo and Kaluga. On Yandex Maps, the sites are blurred, and when searched by address, the service does not indicate that data centers are located there. When and why the company hid the images remains unknown.
